The Anchor Yale Bible is a prestigious commentary series of 84 volumes, and it represents the pinnacle of biblical scholarship, drawing from the wisdom and resources of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish scholars from around the world. It includes Jacob Milgrom’s 3-volume Leviticus commentary, Joseph Blenkinsopp’s commentary on Isaiah, Joseph A. Fitzmyer’s commentary on Luke, Raymond E. Brown’s commentary on John, and a lot more—84 volumes in all.

Many Logos users picked up the entire set last spring when it was on Pre-Pub and got a great deal. But, for whatever reason, some missed out.

The combined sale prices for the Old Testament and New Testament sets are a little higher than the whole series together, so the entire 84-volume set is still a better deal if you want all the commentaries. But if your research interests lie in a particular genre of Scripture—like the Pentateuch—or you’re a pastor and you want to expand your library of commentaries on the Gospels or the Pauline epistles, then consider getting one of these sets while they’re on sale this month. The sale prices expire on February 28, so don’t wait!

All the commentaries in the Anchor Yale Bible are also among the 3,000 books (and counting) you can access in the Logos iPhone app. That means you can now access the entire set—84 volumes, 43,315 pages, and 160 pounds of print books—all in the palm of your hand, wherever you take your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Remember, this sale expires at the end of the month, so order now! Use coupon code ANCHOROT for the Old Testament commentaries and ANCHORNT for the New Testament commentaries at checkout to take an additional $200.00 off the sale price listed on the product page. Even better, you can use a payment plan to spread out the cost over the next several months. This is also a great way to apply your monthly or quarterly book budget to a new set of Anchor Yale commentaries.

Community Pricing offers some amazing deals on classic works in the field of biblical and theological studies. Thousands of Logos users have gotten books for less than the price of a latte or a gallon of gas (which is around $3.00 in Bellingham, Washington).

We estimate how much it will cost to produce a book. Let’s say a book costs $10,000 to produce. It could get into production under a number of scenarios:

If 100 people bid $100

If 1,000 people bid $10

If 10,000 people bid $1

These are just examples, and this is a hypothetical book. There are also lots of other combinations of orders and prices that would get this to $10,000. But it should be clear that the more people bid, the lower the price is for everyone. It makes no difference what the final price is, as long as the costs are covered. The book will go into production whether one person bids $10,000 or whether 10,000 people bid $1. The math is the same.

What Does the Graph Mean?

Because there are endless combinations of orders and prices that push a project over the cost estimate, the progress for each book is tracked on a graph. This graph will give you an idea where most people are placing their bids.

You place a bid at the highest price you’re willing to pay. To do this, simply click on the dollar amount on the graph. Once the peak of the graph crosses the 100% threshold, bids are placed on the following Friday.

How Should I Bid?

Let’s say a project crosses the threshold at $16. If you bid $16 or higher, your bid is placed. That means if you placed a bid for $20 or $30 for Alford’s New Testament for English Readers, you’ll still get it for $16 (or less). Unfortunately, if you bid less than the closing price, your bid won’t be placed.

The bottom line? Bid the maximum possible price you’d be willing to pay for a book. If you bid high you’ll never miss out on a deal, but if you bid too low you won’t be able to change your bid after the title moves from Community Pricing over to Pre-Pub.

Do you find yourself living in a Greek lexicon as you work through the text of the New Testament?
Do you do look for the lexicon to tell you more about how a word is used, and the different contexts in which the word is used?
If you do, chances are you have already invested in what many consider to be the best lexicon for New Testament Greek, BDAG. And chances are that you love it.
Did you know that there is another Greek lexicon, focused on words that are used in the New Testament, that largely complements BDAG?
It is called The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament, put together by James H. Moulton and George Milligan in the early 1900′s.
Now, “The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament” is not a great name because it doesn’t just sound like a lexicon. But it is. And it isn’t a lexicon like BDAG is a lexicon. That is, it doesn’t re-plow the same field of sources (New Testament, LXX, Apostolic Fathers, Josephus, Philo, Greek Pseudepigrapha, etc.) that BDAG and other Greek NT lexica do; instead Moulton and Milligan (hereafter M-M, which is the way BDAG cites it) plow through the ground of the hordes of papyri that were found in the late 1800′s and early 1900′s, focused on papyri usage of vocabulary items that occur in the Greek New Testament (hence the “Vocabulary” name). They’re looking for insight from how these under-utilized papyri use the same words found in the Greek New Testament.
That’s why M-M is largely complementary to BDAG. They aren’t examining the same sources; they’re examining altogether different uses of the same words. And it is M-M‘s insight, from these scads of papyri that have been found and analyzed, that complements BDAG so well — in fact, so well, that BDAG routinely refers the reader to M-M where M-M has pertinent information. What kind of information? Here’s an example that Milligan uses in his introduction:

In what are probably the earliest of his letters that have come down to us, the two Epistles to the Thessalonians, St. Paul finds it necessary to rebuke his converts for walking “in a disorderly manner” (2 Thess 3:11). The word (ἀτάκτως), with its cognates, is confined to these Epistles in the New Testament, and what exactly is meant by it is by no means clear at first sight. Is St. Paul referring to actual sin or moral disorder, or to something less heinous? The papyri have supplied the answer in a striking manner. Among them is a contract of A.D. 66 [P.Oxy.II 275] in which a father arranges to apprentice his son with a weaver for one year. All the conditions of the contract as regards food and clothing are carefully laid down. Then follows the passage which specially interests us. If there are any days during this period on which the boy “fails to attend” or “plays truant” (ὅσας δʼ ἐάν ἐν τούτω ἀτακτήση ἡμέρας), the father has to produce him for an equivalent number of days after the period is over. And the verb which is used to denote playing truant is the same verb which St. Paul uses in connexion with the Thessalonians. This then was their fault. They were idling, playing truant. The Parousia of the Lord seemed to them to be so close at hand that it was unnecessary for them to interest themselves in anything else. Why go to their daily work in the morning, when before night Christ might come, they thought, forgetting that the best way to prepare for that coming was to show themselves active and diligent in the discharge of their daily work and duty.

One of the best parts of my job is receiving letters. We respond to every one.

I recently received a letter with the subject line: “Today was better than Christmas!”

Good evening John,

I am a new subscriber to your magazine. To be honest I did not even know it existed until a few months ago. I was reading an interview and in the side bar were some cute facts about the gal being interviewed, Wendy Pope. One of the questions she had answered was, “What is on your nightstand currently?”. Her answer was My Utmost for His Highest and Bible Study Magazine. Because Wendy is a fellow lover of all things studious of Scripture, I quickly googled “Bible Study Magazine” and purchased a subscription that very day.

I am a stay at home mom, passionate student of the Word and am currently writing my first book, a study on the book of Ruth. I cannot tell you how thankful I am to have found you when I did. A true gift!

Today I received my second edition and when my husband brought it into the house I actually giggled like a little child on Christmas morning. Can I just say, I love your magazine? I love the interviews, I love the Hebrew Word Study without Hebrew, I love the tricks and tidbits to experience a richer study. And I love the fact that there are actually useable, workable Bible studies in a magazine! I can now say I truly have a favorite magazine and it is yours! It was so needed in the church! Thank you for following God’s call to serve His church in this way. I pray you are blessed one-hundred fold!

Blessings and many thanks!

O’Nealya

Maybe you are like O’Nealya and are looking for a better way to study the Bible. If so, Bible Study Magazine is for you.

Maybe you are a Logos Bible Software user and think Bible Study Magazine is not for you. I know you can still get a great deal out of reading our publication, but nonetheless, if you are happy sticking to your current guns for Bible study—and Logos Bible Software 4 is definitely a fantastic set of guns—that’s fine. But I suggest you consider helping others get into the Word with Bible Study Magazine.

Think about who you know who could use motivation for studying the Bible. How about the people who are struggling through the Bible, and are beginning to feel a little frustrated: Tell them about Bible Study Magazine. Maybe even buy them a gift subscription. Just enter their address in the shipping field at check out.

Bible Study Magazine is for everyone. Help other people get into Bible study this year. Tell them about Bible Study Magazine or subscribe now!

C.E.B. Cranfield is perhaps best known for his two-volume commentary on Romans, which is part of the International Critical Commentary series (ICC, see here and here). And this is rightly so, his commentary is magesterial. But a writer can only handle so many issues in a commentary volume. Many times the rabbit trails run longer than the space one has available.
Did you know that Cranfield also published a collection of essays called On Romans and Other New Testament Essays? While this title is in the Portfolio (LE) collection of Logos Bible Software, chances are — particularly if you’re new to Logos Bible Software in the past few years — you didn’t even know it was available.
In On Romans Cranfield has more of a chance to dig into things that just don’t fit in the framework of a commentary. The table of contents has some details:

‘The Works of the Law’ in the Epistle to the Romans

A Note on Romans 5:20-21

Romans 6:1-14 Revisited

Sanctification as Freedom: Paul’s Teaching on Sanctification, with special reference to the Epistle to the Romans

Some Comments on Professor J.D.G. Dunn’s Christology in the Making with special reference to the evidence of the Epistle to the Romans

Preaching on Romans

On the Πιστις Χριστου (Pistis Christou) Question

Giving a Dog a Bad Name: A note on H. Räisänen’s Paul and the Law

Has the Old Testament Law a Place in the Christian Life? A response to Professor Westerholm

Who Are Christ’s Brothers? (Matthew 25:40)

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ

Some Reflections on the Subject of the Virgin Birth

A Response to Professor Richard B. Hays’ The Moral Vision of the New Testament

As you can see, you also get peeks at Cranfield’s take on areas outside of Romans, and even comments on some on-going discussions like the πιστις Χριστου debate. This is excellent stuff. Printed reviews of On Romans are positively glowing (see the product page for some excerpts). Maybe it’s time to add On Romans to your library too.

John Calvin is one of the church’s greatest theologians, and Calvinism one of the Western world’s most influential intellectual movements. Calvin was a theologian, pastor, biblical exegete, and tireless apologist for Reformed Christianity. His theological works, biblical commentaries, tracts, treatises, and letters helped establish the Reformation as a legitimate and thriving religious movement throughout Europe and the world.

No theologian has been acclaimed or assailed as much as Calvin. Calvinism has spawned movements and sparked controversy throughout the centuries. Wars have been fought both to defend and destroy it, and its later proponents began political and theological revolutions in Western Europe and America. The breadth and depth of the engagement with Calvin’s works since they first appeared four centuries ago—and their continuous publication since then—testifies to Calvin’s importance and lasting value for the church today. Thinking Christians from the twenty-first century who ignore Calvin’s writings do so at their own peril.

To celebrate Calvin’s birthday and his importance for the church today, we launched the Calvin 500 Collection—a massive project to convert 108 books by or about Calvin to our format. The Calvin 500 Collection includes:

31 volumes of secondary literature on the history and influence of Calvinism

We hoped to complete the project during 2009 (before Calvin turned 501), but it didn’t happen. Some of the texts, like the Norton translation of the Institutes—the first in the English language—took longer than we planned. We also ran into some problems with the commentaries which needed some special attention.

But the biggest delay happened when we launched Logos 4 in November. In the weeks before the launch, all efforts were devoted to making sure it happened as smoothly as possible—finishing all new books for the expanded Logos 4 base packages, working with our beta testers, building the new Logos iPhone app, training our customer service department and sales teams, and hundreds (thousands?) of other behind-the-scenes projects.

We’ve been busy since the release, too. We’ve been reading the emails you’ve sent us, talking to you on the phone, closely watching the Community Forums, listening to customer feedback, creating training videos and support pages, and doing everything we can to make Logos 4 even better. Since the launch, we’ve released a major update to Logos 4, with tons of new features. We’ve been updating the Mac version just about every week. And we just came out with a brand new update to the Logos iPhone app which now allows offline reading on your iPod Touch or on the iPhone when you’re in an airplane. Oh, and did we mention there are 1,000 more books available for reading on your iPhone than there were a month ago? These are just a handful of great reasons to upgrade today—and until the end of next week, you can still get 25% off when you upgrade to Logos 4.

Fortunately, even though it’s 2010 now, John Calvin is still 500 years old. He doesn’t turn 501 years old until July 10, 2010, and by then, you’ll be using Logos Bible Software to read all of Calvin’s commentaries, books, and theological works.

In fact, you’ll be reading the new Calvin books much sooner than July. We are very, very close to finishing the project. Although we are not quite ready to project a ship date, we can promise that it will be soon.

One last thing, the Pre-Pub price for the Calvin 500 Collection will go up on Friday, which means you still have four more days to lock your order in the current price. If you’re thinking of pre-ordering, do it now before the price goes up.

Our number one priority for the past couple months has been the launch of Logos 4 and keeping our customers happy. We’ve devoted our entire company to ensuring that this happens.

Now that Logos 4 is launched, our electronic text department has returned to some other projects. They are wrapping up several Pre-Pub books and collections, and many are projected to ship in the next few weeks.

You still have a little more time to pick up some great books at a steep discount. Don’t pass up these deals!

This 27-section manual, the most thorough manual to date, covers everything you need to become familiar with the new Logos Bible Software 4. Morris starts by giving you an overview of the Logos 4 desktop to familiarize you with the User Interface. From there, he provides an introduction to the Home Page and Home Page Bible Study before diving into sections on the Passage Guide, the Exegetical Guide, the Bible Study Guide and so much more.

Like attending Camp Logos, Morris provides plenty of tips and reminders which will allow your Bible study to become more productive as you learn timesaving tips and keyboard shortcuts, more focused as you learn how to access the specific Bibles, commentaries, and resources pertaining to your areas of interest, and more fruitful as you spend more time studying and less time searching for study material.

In November of 2010, we released the introductory material, text and apparatuses of the highly-acclaimed Göttingen Septuagint.
We’d planned on releasing the fully morphologically analyzed text, but weren’t able to release it at that time. Due to the importance of the apparatus material, we decided it was worth shipping the product without the morphological analysis, and updating later as the analysis became available. As I mentioned in a previous post about the Lexham LXX Interlinear, the Septuagint is big. The material available for Göttingen is more than three times the size of the New Testament.
Since then, we’ve had some breakthroughs and are thrilled to be able to release a provisional edition of the Göttingen Septuagint with morphological analysis. Nearly 99% of the words in the text are analyzed, with morphology and lemma information; the vast majority of those have English gloss information as well. If you’re a Logos 4 user and have already purchased the Göttingen Septuagint, then the updates have likely already downloaded for you.What do you mean by “Provisional”?
That’s a good question. What we mean by “provisional” is that we’ve done a load of analysis and comparison with our existing Septuagint morphology (used in the Lexham LXX Interlinear and also in the Septuagint with Logos Morphology) and where we could make reliable assumptions about agreements between the two texts, we incorporated the agreeing morphology and lemma information. This is where the “nearly 99%” number comes from. For areas that did not reliably agree, we used other data sets to prepopulate morphology and lemma information; these will be reviewed and corrected over the next months. As individual volumes are reviewed, updates of those volumes will be made available to Logos users who have already purchased Göttingen.
We plan to start the review process in early 2011, but since the coverage was much greater than we’d anticipated, it makes sense to release the provisional edition so that people who already have purchased the Göttingen Septuagint can begin to use the morphology. You know, use features like:

Morphological Searching

Lemma-based KeyLinking

Morphological Visual Filters

Sympathetic Highlighting

While some portions will be reviewed and corrected during this process, the vast majority of the analysis is reliable as it presently stands. Some of the alternate resources (the “alpha” text of Esther and the alternate text of Habakkuk 3) have no analogue in other LXX editions, so the tagging on these is in a much more provisional state than the rest of the material.Note for Mac Users: This is a 4.2 only update. Mac users on 4.0b will continue to use the older versions of the resources. Mac users on 4.2 beta will be able to use the resources. If a Mac user is on 4.0b and wants to have the provisional morph edition, then they can install the beta, and the resources should automatically follow.
Enjoy these updates to your Göttingen Septuagint; and thanks for being patient with us while we make these resources even better!

This commentary uses rabbinical literature to comment on the text of the New Testament, and to help modern readers understand the textual background from within the framework of Jewish literature. Lightfoot makes full use of Hebrew and Aramaic literature to provide thorough commentary on the New Testament. He uses Jewish sources to illuminate not only textual matters, but also the social and cultural context of the people, places, and events in the New Testament. This important work is meticulously written and has served as a model for synthesizing the New Testament with Jewish literature in the four centuries since its first publication. It covers the Gospels, Acts, portions of Romans, and 1 Corinthians.

First written in Latin, A Commentary on the New Testament from the Talmud and Hebraica was first published between 1658 and 1674, and reprinted as a whole in 1675, 1686, and 1699. The first English translation was published anonymously in 1684. It was reprinted in 13 volumes between 1822 and 1825 by John Rogers Pitman—an edition popular in the middle part of the nineteenth century. By the 1850s, however, the Pitman edition was becoming “scarce and expensive,” and work on a new edition was begun. The resulting work was published in 1859 by Oxford University. It remains the standard translation of Lightfoot’s work to this day, and has been reprinted numerous times—most recently by Baker in 1979 and Hendrickson in 2004. This is also the edition which underlies the electronic edition we’re planning to begin working on in the near future.

If you’re interested in Jewish studies and Talmudic literature, or you simply want to add a fascinating commentary to your library, you need to act now. This commentary has generated enormous interest this past week, and the Pre-Pub price is going up soon. Place your pre-order today to show your support for the project!